Writing and Linguistics announces Powell Award winners
Writing and Linguistics is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Roy F. Powell Awards for Creative Writing. The awards are given in honor of the late Roy F. Powell, a former professor of journalism and creative writing who served as advisor to Georgia Southern’s quarterly literary magazine, Miscellany.
The winner in fiction is Conan Stuart, a senior Writing and Linguistics major from Starkville, Ms., for his short story, ‘Things My Mother Made.”
‘I write to find the truth of my own feelings,” Stuart says. ‘If a character does or says something I could never see myself doing, I have to look inside and discover what hidden part of myself allowed that thing to come out on the page. Writing teaches me more about myself. It is a series of revelations.” His literary influences include Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Denis Johnson, Barry Hannah.
Cavion Harris, a sophomore Literature and Philosophy major from Marietta, won in the nonfiction category for ‘At the Clinic.”
‘When I write an essay, a braided essay or a lyric essay, or whatever, I am most confident about the way I write it, the way the words seem to capture a moment, or a particular image the way I intended, or in a way I had not thought of when sitting down to write the essay,” Harris says. ‘Usually I have an idea of what I want to write about, and it doesn’t quite seem to fit the particular emotion I want to convey, but I find new avenues within that emotion and write it in a way that seems magical to me.” Among his literary influences, Harris cited Anne Lamont, James Baldwin, Natalie Goldberg, Robert Frost, Richard Bausch.
In poetry, the winner is Zachary Bush for three poems, ‘The Winter Migration of Blue Crabs,” ‘Our Home on 105-A W. Wayward Way,” and ‘ROYA.”
Bush, a senior Writing and Linguistics major from Atlanta, spoke of his impulse to write as a kind of necessity. ‘What choice do I have in the matter? Writing is not a hobby of mine. I write because it is my trade. It is a love/hate relationship.” Bush is influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Federico Garcia Lorca, and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Roy F. Powell Award winners will receive a cash award of $100, a framed certificate, and recognition at the University’s Honors Day ceremonies on April 4. Their work will be published in a forthcoming edition of Miscellany.
The winning manuscripts were chosen from many excellent entries, according to judges Sonya Huber-Humes, Mark Dallas, and Peter Christopher. For more information, please contact Peter Christopher at 681-5889.
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